6 INDUSTRY NEWS
1.4 million new homes registered in 2010s
The number of new homes registered to be built per year in the UK has risen by more than 80 per cent over the last decade, according to the NHBC’s annual new homes statistics, although completions in London and the south west didn’t follow this trend – being down 7 per cent over the same period.
Over the decade (2010 – 2019), a total of 1.4m new homes (1,405,771) were registered to be built across the UK. These figures reportedly represent the first complete decade since the financial crash of 2007/08.
In 2019, 161,022 homes were regis- tered with NHBC – an 81 per cent increase on the 88,849 homes registered a decade ago (2009), making 2019 the strongest year for NHBC new home regis- trations since 2007. Over the same period,
the West Midlands (169 per cent) and North West (148 per cent) have seen the highest percentage increase of new homes registered.
Compared to the previous year, the number of homes registered in 2019 was up 1 per cent (2019:161,022 v 2018: 158,878). Growth was driven by London, said NHBC, where new home registrations increased by 37 per cent, with both the capital’s affordable and rental (+42 per cent) and private housing markets (+33 per cent) performing strongly. The Build to Rent sector also had another positive year, with registrations up 57 per cent in 2019 compared to 2018. New home completions in 2019 of 150,436 were also marginally up on the previous year (149,702).
Commenting on its new home registra-
Upfront cost makes MMC a ‘challenging environment’
The setup costs of the offsite construction of homes makes undertaking a move to modular a challenging proposition for housebuilders, according to a leading new entrant in the affordable homes sector. Dave Sheridan, executive chairman of
modular startup Ilke Homes, told a meeting staged by NHBC in London to present recent housebuilding data, that upfront costs are “a real barrier,” adding that “unless you’ve got deep pockets, this is a challenging environment to get into, and it’s certainly something you’ve got to come into with your eyes wide open.” Sheridan told the meeting that while Ilke
is looking to construct 1000 homes from its new factory in Flaxby, near Harrogate from the middle of 2020, “we’re bringing people on board when demand on the order book is probably 200 homes, so you’ve got to build the capacity.” He added: “You’ve got a lot of sunk costs
before you start to see returns. It’s certainly something we have learned in the last 12 months; the need to educate the market that a loss isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s possibly a good thing because it’s showing the level of investment that’s being made by the funds, Homes England and Places for People; investing in the future.” Ilke Homes received £30m of support from Homes England in 2019.
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tion statistics for 2019, NHBC chief execu- tive Steve Wood said: “It is great to see the resilience of housebuilders over the 2019 year. This momentum needs to be maintained as we enter a new decade, with the industry ever-more focused on quality and fire safety. “At NHBC we remain committed to our purpose of giving homeowners confidence in the quality of the nation’s new homes and working with house builders as the industry faces into the skills, supply chain and environmental challenges in front of us.”
added: “We thought because of the cost factor and need for more homes, we thought people would buy it, but still the high pitched roof is taking 80 per cent of our orders.” Sheridan told the audience that Ilke was
building its volumetric homes for a mix of tenures, at roughly £850-£1000 per square metre, which was “competitive in the south, but challenging in the north” – in the north east the build cost of a traditional home is typically around £650/m2
. Of the
210 the firm is due to build this year, half will be open market sale via developer Keepmoat (where Sheridan was previously chief executive), and half to housing associ- ation and rental. Ilke aims to move to a rate of 2000
Dave Sheridan Sheridan concluded: “This isn’t a cheap
ticket.” Despite this however, he said that build cost was often competitive, and will be cheaper over time because of savings on “prelims,” adding that “the unit economics will drop the more efficient you get at producing homes.” Planning was another barrier cited by
Sheridan: “We have hit some challenges around regional variations on space standards, and on what looks beautiful and what doesn’t.” He mentioned the example of Ilke’s thwarted attempts to introduce a low-pitch 12.5 degree roof, which would fit under bridges but which had received little favour from planners. “If we could get a planning authority to move, for every unit we provide we could save £12,000.” He
homes from its factory by March 2021, employing 600 people plus 200 on site doing installation and groundworks. NHBC has accepted Ilke’s method as one of 44 systems for MMC it’s endorsing. Sheridan added that with major
demographic challenges facing the industry, it needed to communicate the benefits brought by MMC to attract younger entrants: “We’re not recruiting new talent, there’s still a misconception about people working in trenches and laying bricks. We have to move on from the debate around 1950s and 60s prefabs, it’s a totally different unit.” He concluded that “working with the
public sector to bring things forward to a common goal” would be “much better than some of the ways that we currently engage with public land and local authorities.”
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